Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  After a week or two of leaving inflammatory messages by the side of the main road, we became bolder and more ambitious. Sickened by what Radio Paris was broadcasting—the station was no more than a mouthpiece for Goebbels and his cronies—we decided to set up a news service of our own. Since Claude’s English was better than mine, it was her job to tune in to the BBC, especially to the broadcasts of the self-styled “Colonel Britton.” She would jot down any information or ideas that she thought might be of use to us and then convert them into a more digestible or entertaining form. Sometimes she wrote a fable, sometimes a poem. Sometimes it was a snatch of dialogue, like an excerpt from a play. I would translate whatever she gave me. I would often add an illustration, too—Göring with a napkin tucked into his collar, devouring a plate of German pilots, or Hitler with his right arm in a sling, unable to salute. Later, while I slept, Claude would type the pieces up, using carbon paper to produce as many as a dozen copies, and varying her typing style in an attempt to give the impression that we were not just two people, but an entire movement. We tried to make our leaflets look as if they came from somebody worth listening to. We wanted them to feel personal, like a voice whispering in your ear. Like a conscience.

  In the early days of our campaign, we went for two or three long walks a week, gathering berries or mushrooms or even, sometimes, cigarette butts—supplies of tobacco on the island were already running low—and depositing our leaflets as we went. If there was a Nazi funeral in the graveyard next to our house, I would keep watch from an upstairs window while Claude slipped out of the side door and dropped subversive material into the staff cars parked outside the church. Once, I looked beyond her, over the wall, and saw the new Kommandant, Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, standing at the graveside of a fallen soldier, his hands clasped behind his back. It was strange to think that, but for me, he also might be dead.

  “What if they suspect us?” I said to Claude. “We live so close.”

  “They won’t,” she said. “No one living this close would dare to behave so recklessly. No one would be that stupid.”

  On Saturdays, we traveled into St. Helier. Giving priority to areas that were popular with German troops, we deposited our leaflets in outdoor locations—on walls, in letter boxes, under doormats. We dressed as ordinary countrywomen, in raincoats, headscarves, and Wellingtons. Wary of leaving any fingerprints, we always wore gloves. By the autumn of 1941, each of our leaflets had the words Bitte verbreiten—Please distribute—printed in the bottom right-hand corner. Like a newspaper, we wanted as big a circulation as possible.

  As the months went by, we discovered ways of widening our reach. We realized that if we hid a leaflet in a German vehicle it was unlikely to be discovered until the truck or car was in another part of the island altogether. The same technique could be applied to individual German soldiers. In restaurants and cafés, I became adept at secreting leaflets in their coats, their knapsacks, or even in their boots. Claude was astonished at my nerve. I had clearly missed my vocation, she told me. I should have been a pickpocket.

  It was generally Claude who thought up the text, but sometimes I surprised her. One morning, when she woke, I handed her a scrap of paper on which I had transcribed the following:

  Jesus is big—but Hitler is bigger

  Jesus laid down his life for people

  But people lay down their lives for Hitler

  “This is excellent,” Claude said. “And I know just what to do with it.”

  Once I had produced a number of placards, the Gothic characters executed in the red, black, and gold of the German national flag, we left them in prominent positions in the entrances to all the churches that were frequented by the occupying forces. Later, we learned that some German soldiers had taken our piece of provocation at face value, believing it to have been issued by the Nazi high command. In a church in St. Helier, an SS officer had marched up the nave, escorted by soldiers armed with machine guns, and proudly nailed one of our placards to the pulpit. Members of the local congregation were scandalized, and the Kommandant had to intervene. Claude and I were delighted with the outcome. If nothing else, we were spreading confusion and disorder.

  That summer, our housekeeper Edna married a local man called George, and they moved in with us. Though George was a great help, particularly with the heavier jobs, life became more complicated. We could only work on our campaign during the small hours, after the newlyweds had gone to bed. It was imperative they didn’t know what we were up to—for their own safety and for ours. Edna was famous for her indiscretion, not least when she had been drinking—and she was always drinking. We adored her wayward and irrepressible spirit, but she was not to be trusted with a secret. During the occupation, you didn’t tell anybody anything, not even those closest to you. Not unless you couldn’t avoid it.

  If our privacy had already to some extent been compromised by the presence of Edna and George, worse was yet to come. In October of that year, a German officer knocked on our front door. He was seeking lodgings for a number of horses, and for the men who looked after them. Edna tried to persuade him to commandeer one of the many evacuated houses in the area, but he claimed they were all taken. Besides, it was obvious that we had plenty of room. As we showed him round, he was politeness itself, asking if he might perhaps use the small bedroom and bathroom at the top of the main staircase. We could hardly say no.

  Given almost no time to prepare, we moved into the rooms next to the kitchen, at the east end of the house, taking the blankets, the curtains, and the electric radiator with us. We hid anything that might make our unwelcome guests more comfortable. We carried our valuable books and artworks up to the attic and locked the door, but we had to leave our furniture and carpets where they were. The officer returned. The soldiers in his charge were billeted in the entry hall, and the horses, four of them, were stabled in the garage, though they were always escaping, and were often to be found in our garden, devouring the plants.

  “I never thought we’d end up actually living with the Nazis,” Claude muttered on the day of their arrival.

  I shrugged. “Maybe it will concentrate our minds. Give our propaganda a new edge.”

  Claude gave me one of her disparaging looks. “Mine didn’t need concentrating.”

  “In any case,” I went on, “I’m sure it’s only a temporary measure.”

  It was seven months before they left.

  One bitter evening, as we huddled by the electric heater, Claude suggested that we leave some leaflets in the St. Brelade’s Bay Hotel, which the Germans had also requisitioned. They were using the hotel as a Soldatenheim—partly a barracks and partly a place of relaxation—and late at night we could often hear the soldiers shouting and singing.

  “But it’s so close,” I said.

  “You said that about the staff cars outside the church. The same argument applies.” Claude saw that I wasn’t convinced. “Anyway, this time you’re coming too.”

  She would take care of distribution, she told me, while I distracted any German soldiers who happened to be on duty.

  I looked at her. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  I should ask them questions, she said, and appear not to understand the answers I was given. I might even seem to be having trouble grasping the idea that the island had been occupied. It might be useful if I pretended to be a little slow.

  “In that case,” I said, “perhaps you should be the decoy.”

  She sighed.

  Obviously, I was free to improvise, she told me later, but under no circumstances was I to let it be known that I spoke German. She began to tremble. As I knew full well, all German speakers were supposed to have reported to the authorities, yet another order we had failed to observe.

  “If you’re nervous,” I said, “we can always postpone it.”

  She looked affronted. “I’m not nervous.”

  “You’re
shaking.”

  “That’s excitement.”

  I remembered how she had trembled once when I touched her on a winter evening in Nantes. My fingers on her neck, under her hair. Little earthquakes happening inside her. I had asked her if she was all right. She murmured something I didn’t catch.

  The pools of lamplight on the towpath, and us between them, in the darkness. The black of the canal—

  “Suzanne?”

  Claude was leaning forwards in her chair. She wanted to know if I was ready.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We need a name,” Claude said.

  We were lying in bed, a gale blowing outside, the glass panes creaking in their lead frames. It was the winter of 1941, the coldest in fifty years, and rationing had been extended to bread and fuel.

  “Our leaflets would be more effective if they were signed,” she went on. “Not by us, obviously, but by someone. We need to invent a persona.”

  “A German persona,” I said.

  “Yes. But I don’t think an ordinary person will work. There would be no mystery, no tension. We want something that appears to undermine them from within.”

  “A soldier—”

  “Yes.”

  The space between us seemed to tighten.

  “He should be anonymous,” I said, “like those soldiers who die in battle, but whose bodies are never identified…”

  The messages would appear to be coming from one of their own, a man who had lost faith in the regime. Or perhaps he was one of the fallen, and realized that he had thrown away his life. Perhaps he was a kind of ghost…I thought of the house we were living in—La Ferme sans Nom—and my heart leapt.

  “We should call him ‘The Soldier without a Name,’ ” I said. “Is that mysterious enough for you?”

  I felt Claude go still. “He could be alive,” she said, “and stationed on the island—or else he could be dead, one of the futile dead, a voice speaking from the dark, beyond the grave…”

  “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  She turned to me and kissed me. “You’re brilliant.”

  A burst of laughter came from the other end of the house, where our German lodgers were entertaining some of their friends.

  The more I thought about it, the more layers of ambiguity emerged. The name could refer to an actual soldier, or to somebody who saw himself as a soldier, somebody who was fighting for a cause. Either way, it would have a destabilizing effect. What’s more, it would conceal our gender. No one looking at the word “soldier” would think of a woman.

  I lay back on my pillow.

  Fear flickered through me, fast and reptilian, like the tail of a rat or a lizard vanishing into a hole in the ground.

  There was the feeling, at the outset, that the German troops who occupied the island were gentlemen—people often referred to them, euphemistically, as “visitors”—and that the stories about brutal behavior elsewhere in the theater of war were exaggerated and unfair. Once, in St. Helier, I passed an old couple sitting on a bench. They’re not so bad, the Germans, I heard the woman say. It was a convenient and self-serving belief, since it allowed local people to “carry on as normal.” There were many who felt justified in cooperating with the Germans, and even, eventually, in working for them. Why not? They paid good wages. By the same token, resistance became problematic, since there was nothing to resist except the idea of occupation itself. But then, in early 1942, the Germans revealed a darker side.

  One bright winter morning, Claude and I were returning from a rare trip into St. Helier when a sharp stink pushed through the bus windows, even though they were closed. I could smell urine and feces, and also something pungent and strangely interior that reminded me of the infestation of mice our housekeeper Nan had to deal with when we first moved into La Ferme sans Nom. The bus slowed until it was barely moving. On the road ahead of us was what appeared to be a long line of prisoners of war. When the guards became aware of the bus, they began to drive the prisoners into the ditch, hitting them with rifle butts and wooden truncheons and sometimes with their fists. The bus edged forwards. Some of the prisoners were adults, but others were boys of no more than twelve or thirteen. It was hard to tell their ages, since they were all so emaciated. One man wore a woman’s dress and a pair of pajama bottoms. His feet were bleeding. He had no shoes. Another wore a jacket with nothing underneath. His ribs stood out like the ribs on a stray dog. One man with a dark bruise on his cheek looked straight at me through the window, his gaze so vacant that I felt I existed in a different dimension. My life, though perfectly ordinary, and happening only a few feet from his, was one he could no longer hope for, or even imagine. I glanced at Claude. All the color had drained from her face.

  “Disgusting,” she said.

  As the bus moved on, towards St. Brelade, a conversation started up among the passengers. Who were those people? What were they doing on the island? A man who worked in the harbor master’s office told us they were part of a new slave-labor force. Most of them were Russians, he said, captured on the eastern front. Some were Spaniards, rounded up in the south of France after fleeing Franco. The slave labor would be used to build anti-tank walls and gun emplacements. Cement was being imported in huge quantities. You could see it if you went down to the docks. The Germans had coined a new word to describe Hitler’s obsession with the Channel Islands. Inselwahn. Island madness. Apparently, Hitler believed Jersey and Guernsey were of vital strategic importance if an invasion of England was to be attempted.

  Several days later, Claude and I caught the bus back to St. Helier. Rain was beating on the roof, and all the windows had steamed up. I wiped a hole in the condensation and peered out. In the pockets of Claude’s Burberry coat were copies of our latest tract. I had drawn a starving Russian prisoner being beaten by an SS guard. I had given the guard the head of a donkey. If you treat human beings like animals, the caption read, you forfeit your humanity. Still outraged by what we had witnessed, Claude had talked me into something I felt we might regret. During the past few months, we had devised and perfected a kind of double act. On entering the Soldatenheim in St. Brelade’s Bay, for instance, I had asked the officer on duty a series of simpleminded questions, while Claude, whose role it was to appear irritable or bored, had wandered away from me, into the hall. Though I had been unnerved by the soldiers playing Ping-Pong in an adjoining room, the tapping of the white ball on the dark-green surface of the table seeming to replicate the irregular, light bouncing of my heart, Claude had succeeded in offloading all the leaflets she had brought with her, some in greatcoat pockets, others between the pages of magazines. This time, though, she had chosen Silvertide, a private house that had been requisitioned by the Geheime Feldpolizei, the secret military police. It was almost certainly the most dangerous building on the island.

  By the time we stepped out of the bus in St. Helier, the rain had eased. We hurried through the wet streets to Havre des Pas. Silvertide was a long white two-story house, the French windows on the first floor giving onto an ornate balcony that ran all the way along the front. As we started up the path to the main entrance, we passed two German officers. They were discussing a girl they had met at a dance. One of them described the girl as “very willing,” a phrase that was accompanied by knowing laughter.

  The hallway had a tiled floor, and smelled of stale cigar smoke and damp cloth. A soldier was sitting behind a desk, like a receptionist in a hotel. He looked up as we approached. He wore rimless glasses, and his mouth was like a paper cut. Something seemed to uncoil low down in my belly. I asked if he spoke French.

  “A little,” he said.

  I used a similar strategy to the one I had used in the Soldatenheim, pretending that I didn’t fully understand the curfew.

  The soldier looked impatient. “The curfew has been in place for eighteen months already.”

  “Has it?” I said. “I live in the far west
of the island, far from everything, and I don’t read the newspapers.”

  “It’s not so big, the island.”

  “Probably if you come from the mainland it feels small, but not if you have lived here for most of your life.” I was aware of Claude moving away from me. “Where are you from?”

  “Cologne.”

  “You have a wonderful cathedral.”

  “Yes.” Lowering his eyes, he adjusted the position of some forms. “The curfew is very straightforward. Everybody must be home by ten o’clock at night.”

  “But someone told me you changed the clocks…”

  “It’s one hour later than it used to be, so ten o’clock is actually nine.”

  I frowned. “Ten o’clock is actually nine. I see.”

  “There are only two exceptions to the rule—Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.” He glanced up at me again. “There has to be some fun, don’t you think, even during a war?”

  “Fun?” I said. “Yes. Of course.” I remembered the officers we had passed on the way in. “Do you have a girlfriend on the island?”

  “A girlfriend?” Suddenly he was flustered. “No—”

  “It’s so exciting for the young women, all you glamorous foreigners arriving.”

  “They find it exciting?”

  “Think about their lives before,” I said. “This is an island. There are not so many choices.” I leaned closer, as if to impart a secret. “Your uniforms have made a great impression.”

  The soldier took off his glasses and began to polish them. He was young, in his early twenties, and though his lips were thin his eyes were earnest, almost kind.

  A door opened and closed behind me, and I heard crisp footsteps on the tiled floor. I looked over my shoulder. A German officer in a black leather jacket stood in front of Claude, who was by the coat rack.

  “What are you doing here?” He spoke English, but with an American accent.